by Carla Kaplan
If Locke was her designated lieutenant, Langston Hughes was Mason’s first true black love. She considered him flawless. He was, Mason told him, “the salvation of your people.” He returned her feelings. “I had loved very much that gentle woman who had been my patron,” he wrote. Hughes was Mason’s “flaming pathway,” a “shining messenger of hope for his people” embodying all her ideals of creative genius. “You are a golden star in the firmament of Primitive Peoples,” she told him. From the time of their first meeting, at Carnegie Hall on February 16, 1927, to sometime in the spring of 1930, Hughes and Mason’s bond defied expectations about ties a wealthy white widow in her seventies could forge with a nearly penniless young homosexual black poet. Building an impossible bridge across differences of gender, race, and class was the charm of their connection. “We don’t bore one another,” Hughes marveled. “She is so entirely wonderful.” Their relationship surpassed even her intimacy with Locke. Mason and Hughes shared opinions about plays, music, and books and collaborated on every aspect of Hughes’s writing and career. Nothing was omitted from their correspondence: his mother, his Lincoln University classes, his younger brother’s welfare, and—especially—his novel Not Without Laughter, which Mason reviewed in draft. She supplied Hughes with a twenty-eight-page chapter-by-chapter critique for which he expressed warm appreciation and to which he paid the closest possible editorial attention. Paying him her highest compliment, Mason called Hughes her “silent Indian chief” and christened him “Alamari” (African war drum).
Hughes’s writing from that time bears Mason’s unmistakable stamp—eerily so at times: “In the primitive world where people live closer to the earth and much nearer to the stars, every inner and outer act combines to form the single harmony, life. . . . The earth is right under their feet. The stars are never far away. The strength of the surest dream is the strength of the primitive world.” Even the syntax is hers.
Through Hughes, Mason met Hurston in September 1927. Mason recognized Hurston’s energy and brilliance straightaway, though some of Hurston’s behavior initially gave her pause. Hurston also described a powerful psychic bond between them. “We got on famously,” she noted. She believed that Mason’s patronage fulfilled a dream she had had many years ago:
Laugh if you will, but there was and is a psychic bond between us. . . . She could read my mind, not only when I was in her presence, but thousands of miles away. . . . I was her only Godchild who could read her thoughts at a distance. . . . She was just as pagan as I. . . . She was extremely human. There she was sitting up there at the table over capon, caviar and gleaming silver, eager to hear every word on every phase of life on a saw-mill “job.” I must tell the tales, sing the songs, do the dances, and repeat the raucous sayings and doings of the Negro farthest down. She is altogether in sympathy with them, because she says truthfully they are utterly sincere in living.
At that point Hurston had spent more than a decade estranged from her family. She had found romantic intimacy nearly impossible, since all the men she became involved with had balked at her ambitions. She was still grieving the early loss of her mother and was deeply spiritual. Mason’s intense nurturing and spiritual beliefs seemed like a godsend.
For Locke, Hughes, and Hurston, forging an intense friendship with such an unlikely woman—different in age, class, race, background, and style—seemed utopian. It promised that anything was possible: all social barriers could be breached. Hurston called Mason her “light” and “True one.” “Darling, My Godmother,” her letters began. “Far-seeing one,” “God-flower,” “the world’s blossom,” she wrote. “How many you have dragged from everlasting unseeing to heaven. . . . I am one of the rescued. . . . I light a candle in your name.” Sometimes Hurston called Mason her “true conceptual mother—not a biological accident.” She signed her letters “Love and Love and Love.” For Mason’s birthday, Hurston wrote poems exalting her as “the Spring and Summer of my existence”; “Out of the Wise One I am made to be/From her breath I am born.” We might think all of that would strike Mason as suspiciously hyperbolic. It never did.
Mason had been mastering four techniques to intensify the interdependency of her patronage relationships since “adopting” the Chapin sisters in 1908: triangulation, keeping secrets, promoting her own exceptionalism, and carefully used criticism. Just as she had triangulated her relationships with Natalie, Katherine, and Cornelia, she now created a triangle of Locke, Hurston, and Hughes, playing them off against one another and encouraging them to jockey for primacy with her. Competition between them would keep her as their center. Or so, at least, she hoped.
Although she never worked outside the home, Mason called herself a “Psychologist.” That was not entirely inaccurate. She had a remarkable command over those she supported. She could be generous, even sweet sometimes, some said, but she was a formidable personality whose powerful “laws,” as she called them, were broken at one’s own peril. One of her laws was silence, “the law of creation,” a way to conserve creativity so “that later when you are ready to use it the flame of it can burn. Only she—with her gift for divining planetary “vibrations”—would know, however, when that right moment had come.
Mason was also fanatical about secrecy. Over a philanthropic career spanning three decades, she allowed her name to be made public only twice. “Flaming results came out of my Indian work because of the profound silence and complete fooling of anyone who wanted to know what I saw in the West,” she believed. She had learned a great deal about how secrecy could work to control others in the years preceding Katherine Chapin’s marriage to Francis Biddle in 1918. The marriage had been Mason’s idea. Katherine and Francis were already in their twenties, unattached, and had compatible interests: reading, lively conversation, a love of the outdoors (Cape Cod especially), a keen interest in politics, closeness to family. But they felt no passion for each other. Mason encouraged a clandestine engagement. “Our engagement was to be a secret, and she [Mason] was determined that we live up to this idea,” Katherine later wrote. Secrecy impassioned them and also tied them both to Mason in a triangle that Katherine described as “delicious” in the “tenderness and warmth” through which “we three move together through it all.” “My greatest happiness,” Katherine wrote in her diary of the engagement, “was always in talking over with Godmother everything we had said and done together . . . and everything I felt. . . . It was pure joy to go over it all with her.” Katherine’s “Secret Diary” records how “very happy we three [were] together”:
Never for one instant did Francis and I feel that we wanted to be alone, away from her—that she was there meant an added halo to our love—sometimes when we were talking intimately or he was kissing me goodnight Grandmother, standing right with us, as she might happen to be, would “go off”—actually her spirit would go far, so as not to intrude, that though she stood there smiling, sometimes we would call her three or four times before she would even hear us and come back with a start and a smile that blest us like sunshine. It was a rare miracle, and a great happiness to us both.
Francis’s feelings are not recorded.
All of Mason’s protégés understood her rules about secrecy. But Hurston was especially uncomfortable with them. Whenever she told the other godchildren what she was doing, whether writing a book or buying a car, she begged them not to let Mason know. Hurston was a first-rate secret keeper, able to lop ten years off of her age without anyone knowing, keep a marriage from every one of her friends and acquaintances, and reveal so little about her teens and twenties that they remain known, to this day, as the “lost years.” Hurston was also building a scholarly reputation as the nation’s premier chronicler of the strategies African Americans use to avoid letting outsiders in:
The Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive. . . . The Indian resists curiosity by a stony silence. The Negro offers a feather-bed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It get
s smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries. The theory behind our tactics: “The white man is always trying to know into somebody else’s business. All right, I’ll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind. I’ll put this play toy in his hand, and he will seize it and go away. Then I’ll say my say and sing my song.”
Hurston’s gift for “feather-bed resistance” was a source of tension between her and Mason. It also conflicted with another of Mason’s “laws.” One pillar of Mason’s carefully constructed edifice was her exceptional status as a white woman who derided whites and whiteness. She especially enjoyed joining with Hurston to mock any black intellectual who “goes to Whiteland to learn his trade! Ha!” Being able to make fun of other whites was one of the privileges avidly sought by Harlem’s white insiders. Such derision-rights are part of the thrill of leaving behind one social group and taking up with another. It can produce a seductive sense of superiority, leading easily to the kind of excess Van Vechten displayed in stubbornly insisting on Nigger Heaven as his title. Langston Hughes encouraged both Van Vechten and Charlotte Mason to enjoy the pleasures of honorary membership. He joined with them, for example, in collecting racist postcards, a large archive of which survives in his papers. The postcards could hardly be more insulting. There are big-eyed pickaninnies stealing Master’s chickens, kerchief-headed mammies caring tenderly for white charges, a “Darkey’s Prayer” for “deliberance” from alligators who chomp on his exaggerated rear end, and so on. Coming across such cards, some scholars have too readily assumed that they’ve discovered evidence of venal racism. But such collecting was meant to demonstrate the opposite: the collectors’ distance from what the collection documents. One of Mason’s gifts was offering people just what they had given up hoping for. Hurston and Hughes had both written insightfully on what Hurston called the “pet Negro” syndrome: the aspect of bigotry that singles out for exceptional devotion one—and only one—representative of an otherwise denigrated group. Locke, Hurston, and Hughes wanted to believe that a less patronizing white love for blacks was possible. They never saw themselves as pets. They were hence particularly susceptible to the idea that Mason was that truly exceptional white person whose racial love broke the racist mold, the one with whom there need be no bar, no distance, no safe cautions.
Mason’s oddest psychological strategy was relentless criticism. She conveyed the sense that only she truly understood her protégés’ flaws and hence only she could help them reach their true potential. When that strategy worked—as it did with the Chapin sisters—it engendered profound dependence. Mason turned criticism into a system. Each protégé, or “godchild,” was classified by the character flaw Mason considered paramount. Each was instructed to keep track of that flaw in a journal, note it down, confront it, and report everything about its daily doings. Mason would then battle the flaw into remission. Hurston’s flaw, Mason believed, was lack of discipline. Locke presented Mason with so many failings that she was hard pressed to choose just one. She noted his “dry & long winded writing”; “his great ignorance of his own people”; his “playing with truth,” which tended to “choke off every vibration I try to start”; his “lack [of] Vision”; his lack of a “philosophy of Living”; his “egotism”; and his “mania for wanting to do my kind of work . . . when you haven’t any spiritual instrument to do it with.” She often chided him for being an incorrigible blabbermouth. “Things do not live within your being silently, to be well born,” she wrote him. “Such a pity your tongue could not be hung front to back so you could preach to yourself and not to the world,” she put it more sharply another time. As one protégé remarked, there was “sometimes a whip in her voice.” Only Hughes was exempt from such criticism.
What worked with the Chapin sisters and Locke did not work with Hurston. Mason felt that Hurston’s genius could succeed only if she regulated it. And although she hoped that Hurston’s anthropological work—especially her investigations of hoodoo in New Orleans—would strike gold and bring back vivid examples of the survival of “flaming” African ways throughout the southern black community, she increasingly let Hurston see her lack of trust. Rather than loosen her hold, she tightened the reins. Hurston seemed to accept Mason’s views. “I see all my terrible weakness and failures, my stark stupidity and lack of vision and I am amazed that your love and confidence has carried over,” she wrote to Mason. Privately, however, the criticisms chafed.
On December 8, 1927, Mason had Hurston sign a contract that made Hurston Mason’s legal “agent” in the collection of “music, folk-lore, poetry, hoodoo, conjure, manifestations of art, and kindred matters existing among the ‘American negroes.’” The contract stated that an agent was needed because Mason was “unable because of the pressure of other matters to undertake the collecting of this information in person.” In return for $200 a month, a camera, and a car, Hurston was to “faithfully perform her task, return . . . and lay before said first party [Charlotte Mason] all of said information, data, transcriptions of music, etc., which she shall have obtained.” Mason maintained a special safe-deposit box for Hurston’s writings and films, to which Hurston did not have keys. Then Mason made her document every penny she spent, from “string beans and canned fruit” to “colon medicine (three dollars) and sanitary napkins (sixty five cents).”
Hurston and Mason both felt that Hurston’s dual background as a Columbia-trained anthropologist and daughter of the folk South was an advantage in the 1920s culture wars over authenticity. They both loved the lowbrow, or what Hurston always called “the Negro farthest down.” But although she very much wanted Hurston to collect authentic material, Mason was afraid to let any of it out of her own control. She wanted to be sure that it would be understood exactly as she intended. The contract contained a strict secrecy clause enjoining Hurston “not to make known to any other person, except one designated in writing by said first party [Mason], any of said data or information.” Mason was especially worried about Hurston’s ties to the anthropologists Franz Boas and Melville Herskovits, whom she saw as competitors and untrustworthy Jews. Mason often upbraided Hurston for a lack of discretion and reminded her frequently of the terms of their contract. “You should not rob your books, which must stand as a lasting monument,” she insisted.
Mason’s distrust destabilized Hurston, who lost confidence in bringing anyone else into the fold, one of the jobs of a Mason protégé. “I am so reluctant,” Hurston confided, “to recommend anyone to you. Often we discuss people and I try to make it clear to you that I am not trying to interest you in them. I’d want to be very sure before I persuaded you to give of your time and energy and blessed spirit and money to worthless people just because I like them. I want you to remember me as worthy of your trust, however imperfect I may prove to be otherwise.” Her wariness felt to Mason like foot-dragging. It was added to her flaws. And Mason tightened her many “laws.” She became “merciless” to breakers of her “laws,” Hurston wrote.
Increasingly, Mason’s notebooks were filled with lists of her many disappointments with Harlem. She felt let down and became anxious about running out of time. Interracial collaboration was much more difficult, it turned out, than she had expected. Predictably, perhaps, she began to blame her disappointments on essential differences in racial character.
“Discouraging Things”
It should not be surprising that Mason’s desperate dreams of Africa did not come to fruition. What is surprising, perhaps, is how quickly they crashed. Only a year after throwing herself headlong into Harlem, she was already thoroughly disgruntled. “The whole movement is so different from what I had dreamed it,” she complained. By 1929, she was very impatient for the “flaming pathway” or “great bridge” that would make good on her investment. Approaching patronage like a business, she wanted to be able to predict her returns precisely. But she had vastly underestimated the feelings she generated. Instead of trying to understand
why her protégés were drawing away, surprised that their “godmother” could be so harsh, she blamed them. Even as they resisted reducing her to a white stereotype, she was too caught up in racialism to do other than fault them racially. Their error, she said, was being too in thrall to white standards and ideals. “I am deeply troubled,” she wrote to Locke in early 1929, “about the white psychology of the Negro situation. That supreme and excellent movement we built . . . is quietly dripping its heart’s blood out in a dumb environment.” By October 1929, a few days before Black Thursday, she was in despair. She told Claude McKay that she was a “better Negro” than most of the Negroes she knew. Her protégés retreated farther.
First Locke revealed that he was disenchanted with her “vision” of the Harlem Museum of African Art. He was lacking in “true” blackness, she responded angrily. “I am a Black God in African art compared to you in the nourishment I give the Negroes, from the root of their primitive ancestry.” As far as she was concerned, Locke’s failure to stay “true to any ideal” she set for him was yet another of the many “discouraging things that have fallen on me from the Negroes.”
Locke and Mason also began to disagree more openly on race itself, the very thing that had drawn them together. Such disagreement was probably inevitable, but Mason had not seen it coming. Locke was an advocate—and an important theorist—of race loyalty. Mason liked and understood that. But he was also an advocate—and an important theorist—of the idea that race was a myth. Mason was a race essentialist. Her belief in racial differences was precious to her. Locke’s position seemed some kind of stubborn unpleasantness. Why could he not share her delight in things she considered authentically Negro? “What am I to do,” she lamented, “and how am I to work for Negroes, when the supposedly most mature one, and influential one, is unreliable?”